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Showing posts from October, 2007

Light goes "out" on Silverlight

Trying to navigate to http://silverlight.net on Saturday, October 20th after 11PM PST gave me this: Oh well, I guess even with bazillions of dollars, not everyone can always be perfect.

The Internet Is Boring - Part II

Mark Cuban wrote the original "The Internet is Dead and Boring" . I just have a few more things to add in addition to what he said. The internet, including the mobile web, is boring, it has been and always will be. The reason that technologies like Flash, Ajax, Javascript, and Silverlight were invented is to combat boredom. When people are bored they turn things off, the put things down, they look for something else to do. That isn't a great model for the internet, because boredom means you'll look for some other content, or you'll turn off your computer all together and do something out in the real world. How are you going to view and click on ads if your computer is turned off? Boredom is one of the biggest threats to the current internet model which is dependant on capturing "eye-balls". In many ways it seems like an arms-race defined as: "a competitive building up of armaments by actors in a conflict". A lot of the current internet seems to

Korea gets no respect from Yahoo Mobile

As of "now" try this: 1) navigate to http://m.yahoo.com 2) click "Yahoo! International" 3) click "Korea" My BB8800 doesn't display Korean correctly. I get a string of about 20 characters and the rest of the page is blank. Seems like they should be able to detect the device type and if it can't display that character set, put up a message saying so. Give it a try and let me know what you get. I'll post when it works again. This is a similar situation to what I discovered with Yahoo and the link to Japan a while back. It was broken for a long time before they fixed it. Yahoo needs some type of automated link crawling tool to verify the top level links on their portal. Maybe they should run it every day to make sure everything is connected.

Mobile Web Americas (the mobile web is dead)

I attended this years Mobile Web Americas in Orlando. There are a couple of people that have written reviews , here is one. They had a good set of speakers but the execution of the whole event could be improved. Of course on the positive side, because the conference was small, you could approach any of the speakers afterward. That wouldn't be possible at a big show like CTIA. One of the sessions was called "Meet the Browsers" where representatives from Nokia, Opera, Microsoft, and Novarra spoke. In general theme of the browser makers seemed to be: "just send us the desktop content and we will make it look OK on your mobile". In a lot of ways it seemed like they were saying "the mobile web is dead, just browse the web desktop page with your phone". Of course that has to be their stance based on the products they sell. I don't subscribe to that line of thought because I believe in "context". When I'm mobile I don't necessarily want